The Microsoft Office Web Components, a new feature of Office 2000, bring the power of data analysis to the Web. With FrontPage® 2000, Access 2000, and Excel 2000, you can publish data as part of a Web page. Then, if you have Microsoft Internet Explorer version 4.01 or later, you can manipulate the data directly in the browser!

Office Web Components are automatically installed by Office 2000 Setup. Three different components are available for use on Web pages: The Office Web Components: PivotTable Lists, The Office Web Components: Spreadsheets, and The Office Web Components: Charts, plus The Office Web Components: The Data Source Component, which provides database connectivity for the PivotTable® lists and charts. PivotTable lists, like the PivotTable reports in Excel, provide a different way to view and report data stored within lists. Spreadsheets provide formulas, functions, and other analytical tools in a spreadsheet format - similar to an Excel worksheet - on a Web page. Charts provide graphical views of data, allowing users to quickly compare values. A chart can be interactive, in that it will be updated on the Web page when its associated data is updated. The Data Source component is the reporting engine behind Data Access Pages, PivotTable lists, and data-bound charts, managing database connections and retrieving records for the other components.

The Microsoft Office Web Components are available in FrontPage 2000 and the new data access page Design view in Access 2000. In Excel 2000, you can choose to publish your data with interactivity when you use the Save as Web page command. In addition, you can use the Office Web Components in other programs that support ActiveX® controls, such as Visual Basic® 6.0.

To learn more about how to work with Office Web Components in an Office program, see Help for the program. Help also contains important information about features and limitations of the Web components.

System and Platform Requirements

The Office Web Components require Microsoft Internet Explorer version 4.01 or later, running on any version of Microsoft Windows® 95, Windows 98, or Windows NT®. Hardware requirements are 16 megabytes of RAM, and any Intel 486 or Pentium Processor, or any DEC Alpha Processor. In order to design a component-based page with Access 2000 or browse a page created with Access, you must have Internet Explorer 5 or later.

Licensing Requirements

Customers must own a license for Office 2000 in order to interactively use an Office Web Component on a Web page within a browser. Organizations that own an Enterprise, Select, or Maintenance Agreement for Office 2000 and that plan to deploy Office 2000 in phases can enable early adopters of Office 2000 to share component-based Web pages with users who haven't yet installed Office 2000.

The component installer in Microsoft Internet Explorer will auto-download the Office Web Components as needed. The Internet Explorer component installer is for use with internal corporate intranets only; it is not intended as a way to pass through firewalls on the Internet.

More to Come!

In a future edition of Microsoft Office Online, we will focus on how to use Office Web Components in your work environment. Be watching for it!